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I had an insightful conversation with a Mexican immigrant the other day.

We also might have had a round of margaritas, which could have enhanced the perceived value of the conversation, but nevertheless, I wanted to share it with you.

It went something like this:

ME: So, I imagine you came here with some expectations about the U.S. What have been your greatest disappointments thus far? (Seriously, I should have been an anthropologist.)

HIM: Besides the fact that no one knows how to make a real margarita?

ME: What, you don’t like the margarita?

HIM: I’m just kidding. I just think it’s (pauses)…interesting how you Americans lick these big pieces of salt off of the rim, as if you were a cow.

ME: I’ll be happy to have your salt if you don’t want it.

HIM: Is that a serious proposition?

ME: After another one of these it might be.

Anyway, disappointments. I want to know what your big, fat disappointments have been about life here in the U.S.

HIM: Well, to be honest, I think the thing that I notice most is how you’re great at making life look good, but very poor at actually living it. The focus is very narrow and revolves only around money. You don’t seem to be very good at relaxing and enjoying the money you’ve made; instead, you’re out there making more money. I just wonder: How much money do you really need?

ME: Funny–there’s a saying that says that you can never have enough money. I guess people take that to heart.

HIM: The other thing is that time seems to pass more quickly here. In Mexico, an hour feels like a day, a day feels like a week, a week feels like a month, and a month feels like a year. Here, it’s the opposite: A year feels like a month, a month feels like a week, a week feels like a day, and a day feels like an hour. I feel like I’m in a rush all of the time. I hate that.

ME: Thoughts on why that is?

HIM: Yeah – everyone is always stressed, worried, and over thinking everything. Your brain never has any downtime. It’s constantly working. In Mexico, you worry about eating. Once you’ve got that covered, your time is yours–it does not belong to overbearing thoughts that completely consume you. We’re grateful to have food on our plate; everything else is a bonus. Then we can live in the moment, instead of constantly trying to control the outcome of all of the future moments.

ME: Interesting. I’m going to make a note of this conversation in my blackberry.

HIM: Why?

ME: So I can write about it on my blog.

HIM: See what I mean? You can’t even be in the present moment now because you’re already thinking of what you’re going to do in the future.

ME: That’s not because I’m an American; that’s because I’m neurotic.

HIM: What does the word “neurotic” mean?

ME: It means I get very upset if certain philosophical Mexican immigrants do not order a second round of margaritas before I’m done typing.

HIM: So neurotic is a synonym for alcoholic?

ME: Very funny.

-

I think most of us would agree that we’re a time-poverty nation, with many of us wanting to get off the merry-go-round but unsure just how to go about doing so.

I once wrote about the U.S. Concept of Time and how our attitude toward time as a tangible resource forces us to become engaged in a never ending battle to mold, shape and bend time to our will. We view it as a limited entity, and therefore have to speed up our lives in order to fit it within time’s confines.

Because of this mind-set, we’ve evolved into a society of do-ers, where action is applauded, and anything less regarded as lazy, unmotivated and weak.

Beyond that, though, why do you think that time seems to move so quickly here in the U.S.? Is it our strict adherence to deadlines and our worship of the clock? Is it a psychological thing, because our minds are so buried in a mountain of to-dos, as my Mexican friend might suggest? Is it because of our value of productivity?

What are your thoughts? (No, you don’t have to buy me a margarita in order to get in on the conversation. This time, anyway.)

It’s modern society in general moving towards this type of lifestyle, modeled from the “success” of America. Unfortunately the problems with the lifestyle don’t show themselves until later. Now more and more Americans are running away from it as fast as they can!

A Traveler on the Road

People in the U.S. do have a twisted concept of time and you’ve nailed it dead-on here. I’ve been living in Nicaragua for about six months now and find that one of the biggest cultural challenges is the time thing. When someone from the U.S. says let’s do it now, generally that means now. Not tomorrow. Not next week or next month. But right now or, even better yet, yesterday. But if you really want to see a country obsessed with doing, doing, doing, you have to go to South Korea. If you think we never stop in the States, you haven’t seen anything! Talk about your off-the-charts stress levels.

http://adventure-some.com Adventure-Some Matthew

This is one of the reasons that I love going home to visit family. There’s a huge difference in the attitudes in the city I live in now, and the small town that I grew up in. I’m definitely geared more for small town life, not for this city (and it’s not even a big city!)

http://UncorneredMarket.com Audrey

Thanks for sharing this – it made me laugh as I can imagine the scene. It reminds me of a business school case study about the cultural differences in time between the United States and Mexico. Some big US manufacturing company (can’t remember the name after all these years) thought that they would incentivize their Mexican workers to work harder and longer by increasing their pay. Instead, the Mexican workers realized that they could work less hours to get the same money they earned before so that’s what they did. What mattered more to them was the extra time with their family and friends.

Having lived outside the States for almost a decade, I find that I get frazzled by the pace and speed of things when I return now for visits.

http://www.mattkoenigphotography.com Matt

When I was last in Indonesia it was quite apparent that life moved at a different pace. They call it “rubber time”. The pace of life was definitely less rushed & hurried compared to the frantic pace one often sees in the US. If I drive down the road here and daydream a bit I’ll get shown the “middle finger” at least once from someone in a hurry to get to the nearest drive-thru window. And maybe that is why I like Indonesia so much. It’s a different pace that is more in tune with the way I tend to operate. I’ve read a bit of “The Overworked American” that Andrew mentioned and it’s a very interesting book. My wife doesn’t understand why we have so few holidays here compared to Indonesia.

http://joelrunyon.com/two3 Joel Runyon | [BIT]

The american work ethic is definitely something simultaneously amazing and deadly.

Great to hear it from an outsider. Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes, to see something that’s been there all along.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=584285549 Peter Bradley

Can’t really relate to the hectic pace. I’ve been drifting in the moment for the better part of a decade, if not longer. Most often, I have no clue what day of the week it is, and I even tend to lose track of the year. And, honestly, I’m doing precisely that which makes me the most happy, and I could care less what current time unit I’m currently residing in.

Course, I ramped it up a notch when I went to a week long art class the other week, and was only marginally connected to the net and phone service. To tell the truth, I didn’t miss it one bit. ^_^

olivia

Well… I’m an immigrant and I can’t relate to what you wrote. I’m sure that’s because generalizations are always inadequate. The obsession with time don’t belong to americans, or europeans, or asians. It’s something related with the times that we are living. Try to have a successful career in a country with less opportunities than the US and for sure you’ll be writing a post while you drink a Margarita. People tend to see some foreigners countries as if they were bucolic places and their people as really wise Malboro cowboys, but the truth is that Mexico DF, for example, has more traffic than San Francisco and the insecurity levels leave small room for a Zen attitude. There are do-ers everywhere you just have to connect with people around the world to see that the concern about this incapability to relax is global.

http://www.raptitude.com David Cain

Loved this. He nailed it. America is about progress — ever focused on “later.” We all grew up with this as normal but it’s actually pretty insane. I like what I hear about the working world in France and Italy. Long lunches (two hours), with wine. We shouldn’t forget to live while we live.

I’m drinking a Dos Equis right now, margaritas later maybe.

http://www.ourlifeinc.com JMS

Great post! For me, I remember setting out to not work as much as everyone and have a life and eventually live my dream life. Funny enough, not now soon became never and here I am. I think so many people just get caught up in their “lives” that they actually have no life at all. Even when I woke up and asked myself what I was doing with my life, I have constantly told myself, 1 more check, then I will make a change. One more check becomes 5 more checks, and next thing you know, I am still sitting in my cube. I bet a lot of those who are “awake” enough to realize are doing the same or similar things.

http://evolvify.com Andrew

The first book that proved to me, in an empirical sense, that modern society (including, but not exclusive to the U.S.) is bullshit was “The Overworked American”. I’ve owned it since the end of the last millennium and it’s still sitting within 5 feet of me as I write this. Anywho, this post reminded me of that book.

http://fungeezer.com Steve Thomas – fungeezer

I want to know if you got the second Margarita or if that sneaky south of the borderer cheated you out of it.

It seems to me that there is a movement afoot to get rid of that very problem of not having time. Isn’t that what the whole life by design and minimalist movements are about? I mean don’t we strive to let go of the time clock?

By the way, try hot apple cider with a shot of whisky. Good stuff!

http://www.crmassageschool.com Roblynn

If you want to disconnect from time, just move to Costa Rica
Oh yeah and don’t buy a car, use the busses for all travel.
For example, tonight is free hot yoga at the yoga studio about 20 miles from our house. That means leave two and a half hours in advance take three busses, walk through a couple of beautiful parks and enjoy the afternoon. Hoping of course that it is not raining too hard.
Are you still planning your trip to Costa Rica?
I just wanted to tell you that I think you are so right on with the home stay option. We have that with our massage school here and that turns out to be every students favorite part of the experience. If only you were going to be here a little earlier we would see you all. We do our sports massage practicums at Manual Antonio beach (my favorite of all).
Could have give you all free massages, on the beach no less.
Enjoy your trip and Pura Vida!

http://cinemasushi.com Kellee

First, thanks for being a Neurotic American so that you could share this wisdom.

We never seem to learn, after countless examples, that money does not buy you happiness. That working yourself to the bone for someone else’s profits just leaves you tired and sad. I’ve worked jobs where they basically are renting your life for awhile, and that’s not time you ever get back.

Maybe all the burned out Americans can move to Mexico and we’ll solve immigration.

Christopher Dugan

You can never have enough money because rampant inflation causes what you have to be worth less over time. The Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates to near 0%. They are practically hemorrhaging money, which means anything you save for the future becomes worthless rather quickly.

The fact that the money they print comes with compound interest strings attached, the money to pay which is never printed, means we are all playing an increasingly negative sum game. The more money they loan out to government and financial institutions, the more debt individuals at the bottom of the financial food chain have to pay in inflation, taxes, unemployment and foreclosures.

We know instinctively that our monetary system has become a race to grab what we can out of the economy before it completely collapses, no matter what the bank-owned media pundits might want us to think. Sadly, it is illegal to boycott the Federal Reserve because the IRS will only accept their notes as payment for your taxes. The only way to keep your wealth from being stolen in this manner, to opt out of the system fully, is through tax evasion.

http://www.briannevillano.com/ BrianneVillano

Ashley,

This was great and he hit the nail on the head. We put so much emphasis on what our time is worth that if we can’t get something done or get compensated in some way, we view it as wasted time. Meanwhile time spent in the way we want, even if it’s lounging around sipping margaritas, could never be wasted.

We all wind up rushing, rushing, rushing right through life and straight into death. And usually much earlier than we’d anticipate due to all the stress of rushing.